Brian, how great to speak with you. How are you?

I’m doing great - thanks for wanting to do an interview with me!

So tell us about Collective-Thoughts, you have brought together 6 bloggers to blog about different subjects regarding Social Media, anything else?

The concept behind Collective Thoughts was to put out a truly unique social media blog with already established social media bloggers in the field. We purposely don’t write about SEO, Google, and things like that. There are enough blogs in that space already

How long have you been blogging?
I’ve been blogging off and on since 2001, back in the days of Blogger (pre-Google) and Xanga.

You’re a consultant and run NowSourcing.com, how do you mix between blogging and consulting?

It’s a simple exercise between the left and right side of my brain and back again Seriously though, it isn’t too hard. Just have to allocate enough hours in the day for both and all is well. I also help clients out in how they should be blogging, so sometimes I get the fun of overlap.

How long do you spend blogging per day?

I don’t blog every day. In fact, I make it a point not to have more than 2-3 posts per week per blog. Still, that doesn’t mean that I’m not making notes for good ideas and upcoming posts. At any given time, I have at least a dozen ideas that just need further development.

You have only just started Collective-Thoughts, how have you gone about getting your articles out to people who are interested in the social media niche?

While Collective-Thoughts is new, it is already a PR5 site and has received some major attention. All of the bloggers are already recognized in the social media space, so a lot of it is just happening. The articles have done well in social media in the StumbleUpon and Sphinn communities, to name a few.
So in regards to search engine optimization and social media marketing, how hard are methods like link bait for bloggers just starting out?
Linkbait is an art. Basic fundamentals such as choosing an effective avatar and the right title are of the utmost importance. Content is also extremely important, but if you do not get noticed, your otherwise great content will be lost in the shuffle.

Can you explain different types of social media marketing?

social media branches out as follows: Social news - (Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Mixx, niche social news sites) Social bookmarking - (Del.icio.us, ma.gnolia) Social networking - (Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn) Blogging - (Wordpress, Blogger, LiveJournal) Video - (YouTube, Google Video) There is a wealth of information and community to be found within these networks. The key is to get in and get involved in the communities andtopics that are of interest to you.

Do you think social media marketing is a good way of marketing a website?

It depends on what you’re after and how good your website is. Social media won’t help a product that sucks - it isn’t magic.

Do you expect social media marketing to change over the next 12 months forexample? How fast is the social media industry growing?

A lot can happen in this space over the period of a year. I’d expect to see some sort of change in Digg, probably to be sold. Look for Mixx to gain more prominence, Twitter to become more vital, and interesting things from Google and Yahoo.

Thanks for taking some time to answer these questions Brian.
You bet! Thanks for having me.

If you want more information about NowSourcing.com get in touch with Brian though the website and if you want to know more about Social Media check out Collective-Thoughts.

Hello Dimitri, great to interview you. So tell us about PSD2HTML, your a US based group of coders who supply hand coded mark up for design in under 8 hours? What else should we know about PSD2HTML?

PSD2HTML is more then just a group of coders. It is a complex infrastructure behind the coding process that helps PSD2HTML to achieve the high quality of the product. Much attention is devoted to the communication with the clients, which is performed by a professional team of Managers and Support.
I would like to specially underline that all the communication is performed under the Client Area of the PSD2HTML site where the clients can post tickets, messages and new orders as well as read the replies from the Managerial / Support teams. This ensures additional reliability of the process since the clients are not in contact with a single person but their messages are monitored by the whole Managerial / Support teams. This guarantees quick responses and protects our clients against the human-factor.
The Quality Assurance Team behind the Coding Team tests the markup carefully under all the browsers and platforms to make sure the result is perfect.
The satisfaction of our clients is very important for us. In order to do that PSD2HTML is always open for free rapid minor tweaks, changes if required after the work is done. For the returning clients we propose the option to have a dedicated code style / requirements which will is used for their projects.

Do you get many returning customers, who are satisfied with there previous work and come back for more?

We have 99.99% of satisfied customers and most of them tend to return.

You now offer WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, Joomla, Pligg, Blogger, Shopify, X-Cart, CMS Made Simple, CubeCart coding, how has offering these services helped PSD2HTML?

The key policy of PSD2HTML is satisfaction of the clients. We propose these options to be one stop shop for our clients. These services help us have a wider range of service to offer our clients to improve satisfaction, we like to offer as much as possible.

More of the interview is coming soon.

If you like what you hear about PSD2HTML you can enquire about a project at PSD2HTML

So James, firstly its great to get the chance to interview a young talented designer such as yourself. How did you start designing and how did you get into freelancing? How long have you been freelancing for?

Hello there Jason, great to be getting interviewed here at Lushable, such an honour. To answer your question, i’ve been designing and what not for over 6 years, although i’ve only been in the freelancing scene for four years, I can still remember the first day I opened Photoshop, I fell in love instantly!

What was what the first domain name you ever bought and what did you use it for?

Ha! Great question, well my first domain I ever bought was digital-kurruption.co.uk - my plan for this was to have my very own website were I would give off .psd’s of movie stars, celebrities, models, wrestlers, logos, everything really. Back in those days it was like the kind of niche that everyone was getting into. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough experience yet to make it happen!

Your a student studying Multimedia Visualization with Product Design. How do you balance being at university and freelancing?

I love being a student and love freelancing, so I kind of balance it out by just
letting things go the route their suppose to go. Some days i’m in university from 9AM till 12PM so when I come home, I have all day to do anything that needs to be done.
In other cases I am at university from 12PM till 5PM and these classes are usually a
bit more demanding, so I’m quite tired when I come in and don’t really do much, but if theres stuff to be done I’ll have the urgency to do it.

So to talk about your freelancing, who is your typical client at the
moment, what type of work do they hire you for?

To be honest I can’t really answer this question. I don’t have a client who always
comes back for more work. Yes they’ll come back but not for another 3-4 months or
so. At the moment I’ve been working on alot of advertisement and logo designs. I
have recently learned some new tricks and techniques in Photoshop that I’ve been implementing to my work so what this space!

How do you go about finding work?

For the four years of being a freelancer, I have always had a place online were I
display my work so that really helps if a client is looking for previous work. I
also visit alot of forums and post in the marketplaces alot so that helps as most
people just stumble across your thread and think,’Hey I like this guys work, i’ll contact him’ really does outsource fast.

Considering your varied graphic skills, which ones do you think are most
vital for impressing a client?

I really focus on website design and forum design, but coming to the end of 2007 I
was getting alot of requests for wordpress blog design. I guess website material is my most favored, you can easily tell that by looking at my portfolio.. hehe!

How many hours more or less do you work weekly on designing for clients?

Basically when I have spare time, I dedicate it to working on clients. Obviously, I
love my social life especially with the age I am at, but I really love designing and will always make time for it.

So weekly i’d probably say I spend around 50+ hours. I’ve always been a really fast paced worker and always like to get paid quickly (who doesn’t?) so when i’m handed client work I usually try and get it done within a day or two.

After university do you plan on still being a freelancer?

As I’ve said previously, I love everything about freelancing and hope to step it up
more professionally this year. But I’ll just have to wait and see what happens, I
plan on taking a year out this year from university and find work either working
from home or working at a local design firm, but time is of the essence. If I was to
decide to work full time, i’d probably not have the time to freelance, but I always
make time for important things and it sure would be nice to have freelancing money on top of my monthly pay.

What software do you use for designing and what browser and operating system do you use?

I use Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Photoshop CS3 only. I have skills in other
programs although not to the advanced level that I have in PS. I tried Mozilla
Firefox when it was released and have used it ever since. I really need to upgrade
my computer, this month I plan on buying more RAM so I can run a few more windows, after all Photoshop takes up SO much memory. But I run on Windows XP Home Edition.

Where do you get inspiration for your designs?

One time ago, I wrote a post on EatFruitPlease and its when I was just introduced to the whole blogging scene and I wrote a post on were I got my inspiration from, was quite a nice post. Anyways, I’ve always loved nature like plants, flowers, birds everything about mother nature. I have my window 90 degrees from were i’m sitting at now, so when I’m lost for inspiration i usually just climb over my bed and have a look out the window for about 20 minutes. I know it sounds sad and depressing but it really helps me to start designing or it usually just clicks something in my brain to come up with something in Photoshop which then leads to a design.

Apart from designing for clients, do you plan on developing your own
projects?

A question that I will always keep asking myself. I usually relate my blog to this question because EatFruitPlease has probably been the only website i’ve kept for a good while and actually updated. I guess its the process that comes into place. Creating a blog post is really easy and simple to do, if it was hard and long winded i’d probably have no websites of my own. But I guess 2008 is a new year and I will probably invest in getting a website online. I have new plans for DynoThemes though. For all of you who don’t know
what DynoThemes is, its going to be a website were it’ll giveaway (free) fully functional, valid wordpress themes.

Me and a friend have been chatting about getting it online and see how it goes, so
we’re going to do just that.

Currently you only design but do you have any plans to learn code e.g;
XHTML, CSS and PHP?

If you look here its
one of my main goals for 2008. I’ve always said I need to learn coding so i’m going
to make it happen this year. Obviously if I get into a local design firm, i’ll probably get lessons and be taught basic xhtml/css but overtime it’ll develop. Believe it or not I used to code in HTML pretty well like my designs and stuff, but it was the period were I wasn’t freelancing. But definitely, this year i’ll get into it, its finding the time to delve my time into it but if I did become really good at it, i could make double what i’m making from freelancing at the moment… thats the
really exciting part about it hehe!

So here comes the $1million question, what advice do you have for other freelancers or designers wanting to start freelancing?

I always remember my time starting out and when I had free time I was always on my
computer testing out the tools in Photoshop, reading and trying tutorials, becoming
friends with top end designers - this is really helpful as you really do learn alot
from someone more experienced. I’d also highly recommend any new starting out
designers to get involved in freelancing and making money straight away. The more
quicker you do, the more experienced you’ll become at it overtime. Thats one of my
long term regrets is not getting into freelancing quicker, I was too focused on how
my designs looked aesthetically rather than looking at the more brighter side and
attempt trying to sell.

Lastly another pointer to beginners, there’ll be times were you’ll feel down because
your work isn’t selling. Don’t get down. I’ve experienced it many times and i’ve
just kept trying thats basically the only way you can overcome it is to just keep
trying.

I’d just like to wish any beginners out their luck in their journey ahead of them.

Thanks for taking some time out to answer these questions James, best of
luck with your future and current projects.

If you are really interested in James’ work you can check out his landing page on
KolaKube.com - if your further interested in hiring James then please email him for
further information about either getting his resume or examples of his work.

You can view James’ blog over at EatFruitPlease.com